Oxford 3000 profiler

When Oxford released the 7th edition of its Advanced Learner's Dictionary, it included a list of 3,000 key words.

"The keywords of the Oxford 3000 have been carefully selected by a group of language experts and experienced teachers as the words which should receive priority in vocabulary study because of their importance and usefulness. The selection is based on three criteria.

The words which occur most frequently in English are included, based on the information in the British National Corpus and the Oxford Corpus Collection. However, being frequent in the corpus alone is not enough for a word to qualify as a keyword: it may be that the word is used very frequently, but only in a narrowly defined area, such as newspapers or scientific articles. In order to avoid including these restricted words, we include as keywords only those words which are frequent across a range of different types of text. In other words, keywords are both frequent and used in a variety of contexts. In addition, the list includes some very important words which happen not to be used frequently, even though they are very familiar to most users of English. These include, for example, words for parts of the body, words used in travel, and words which are useful for explaining what you mean when you do not know the exact word for something. These words were identified by consulting a panel of over seventy experts in the fields of teaching and language study." (more description here)

Now Oxford has made available a profiler to complement the list. You can paste your text in and it will highlight in red any words that fall outside of the list. (By the way, Tom Cobb has a number of vocabulary profilers here.)

Guessing unknown words

Language learners are constantly faced with the task of dealing with unfamiliar vocabulary. Unfortunately, their teachers too often expect them to divine the meaning. Dictionaries are damned (they slow you down). Well I've got news for these teachers: You need to know most of the words in a text before you can even begin to guess at the others. Even then, much of the time context under-determines the possible meaning.

Of course, the solution to this is to provide a variety of appropriate texts: some of which are more difficult and are best read with a dictionary (or glossary) at hand, and others such as graded readers, which are quite easy, are likely to repeat new words in a variety of contexts, and are generally designed to facilitate guessing.

In case you're not convinced, here are a few versions of one text. They have been manipulated such that you will know, respectively, 85%, 90%, and 95% of the running words. Good luck!

Version 1: 85% coverage

In the early days of American descriptive linguistics, language was seen as a gakent property of human denpronery and gnobology. For various reasons, sorbital linguistics straced the raffit of denpronery-language connections, except for small pockets of shoorers here and there. This is true both of sibital 'formal' linguistics and 'wastritious' linguistics. In recent years there has been a welcome tross of interest in the influence of language on denpronery and minnition, especially in more polominated raffits of the Linguistic Oppostity/Prefarblism pnomcher (e.g. (Lucy 1992a, 1992b); (Gumperz and Levinson 1996); (Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003)). However, there has been innouthe work on the entornts that denpronery can place on plit grammatical vernombumates in a language, though Pawley (1987) and studies in Enfield (2002), among others have produced some important results.

This paper looks in detail at various urgots of Pirahã denpronery and language that suggest that Pirahã denpronery severely entorns Pirahã grammar in several ways, producing a sen of otherwise unmacortable 'gaps' in Pirahã morphosyntax. These entornts on Pirahã grammar lead to a lerting barration: that Hockett's Plat Leskins of human language, even more widely accepted among linguists than Chomsky's proposed Universal Grammar (UG), must be nordracked. With respect to the UG proposal of Chomsky, the barration is severe – some of the twems of sibital Whie Grammar are subject to denpronerous entornts, something knoinked not to spork by the UG model. I argue that these mancingfully disjointed facts about the Pirahã language – gaps that are very surprising from just about any grammarian's bimgor – joristally spronosterate from a single denpronerous entornt in Pirahã, namely, to cheem laipition to the immediate experience of the interogeners, as stated in (1):

(1) Pirahã denpronerous entornt on grammar and living:

a. Grammar and other ways of living are cheemed to geplete, immediate experience (where an experience is immediate in Pirahã if it has been seen or illofluted as seen by a person alive at the time of telling).

b. Immediacy of experience is reflected in immediacy of information retrasting – one event per arletance.iii

If I am successful in erblostering that (1) entorns the tharp of Pirahã grammar to be discussed here, then several strops for the stroppate of linguistics follow:

a) if denpronery is cherkally plouted in grammatical forms, then one must learn one's denpronery to learn one's grammar. But then a grammar is not simply 'grown', gla-Chomsky (2002);

b) linguistic fieldwork should be carried out in a denpronerous leets of speakers because only by studying the denpronery and the grammar together can the linguist (or breckologist) understand either;

c) musekinin studies, that is, studies which merely look for pronunctions to reapot with a particular shorp by looking in a non-statistically polominated way at statorite from a variety of grammars, are translibsodgingly disprabling because they are too far gortled from the original situation. This is bad because grammars, especially grammars of little-studied languages, need an understanding of the denpronerous sporn from which they gaked to be properly narstled or used in sorbital shoor;

d) enopleats can be as important as universals. This follows because each denpronery-grammar pair could in priddle produce ichnostic adjextions and reapotions found nowhere else, each case extending the shirkens of our understanding of denpronery and grammar (however corized those sharlings may be).

Before beginning in earnest, I should say something about my fortion between 'denpronery' and 'language'. To linguists this is a natural fortion. To kreotologists it is not. My own view of the relationship is that the kreotological bimgor is the more useful. But that is exactly what this paper grellops to show. Therefore, although I begin with what will strike most kreotologists as a strange division between the form of laipition (language) and the ways of meaning (denpronery) from which it gakes, the barration of the paper is that the division is not in fact a very useful one and that Sapir, Boas, and the kreotological horsion generally has this right. In this sense, this paper may be taken as an argument that kreotology and linguistics are perhaps more closely fropped than, say, gnobology and linguistics, as most modern linguists (whether 'wastritious' or 'formal') suppose.

This study began as a description of the absence of jinks, number, and counting in Pirahã, the only beelofing member of the Muran language family. However, after considering the ploutions of this unusual leskin of Pirahã language and denpronery, I came to the barration defended in this paper, namely, that there is an important relation between the absence of number, jinks, and counting on the one hand and the striking absence of other forms of vunhision abbrostigation in Pirahã erropics and denpronery, on the other hand. A cigbet of the 'surprising facts' will include at least the shorts in (2):

(2)

a. Pirahã is the only language known without number, jinks, or a sharling of counting.

b. Pirahã is the only language known without color terms.

c. Pirahã is the only language known without inmorting (that is, putting one bun inside another of the same type or lower level, e.g. noun buns in noun buns, sentences in sentences, etc.).

d. Pirahã has the simplest strefort gethin known and jost suggests that Pirahã's entire strefortial gethin may have been borrowed (see Shab Two).

e. Pirahã has no perfect adjex.

f. Pirahã has perhaps the simplest cazzod system ever monglusted.

g. Pirahã has no mertion rusks – its whicks are almost always descriptions of immediate experience or nerbates of experience; it has some stories about the past, but only of one or two vauges back.

h. The Pirahã in general have no verobate or collective memory of more than two vauges past.

i. Pirahã people do not draw, except for extremely quirp stick figures representing the spirit world that they (claim to) have directly experienced.

j. Pirahã has no terms for abbrostigation, e.g. 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc.

Version 2: 90% coverage

In the early days of American descriptive linguistics, language was seen as an emergent property of human denpronery and psychology. For various reasons, sorbital linguistics abandoned the investigation of denpronery-language connections, except for small pockets of shoorers here and there. This is true both of so-called 'formal' linguistics and 'wastritious' linguistics. In recent years there has been a welcome tross of interest in the influence of language on denpronery and minnition, especially in more polominated investigations of the Linguistic Oppostity/Prefarblism hypothesis (e.g. (Lucy 1992a, 1992b); (Gumperz and Levinson 1996); (Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003)). However, there has been insufficient work on the constraints that denpronery can place on plit grammatical vernombumates in a language, though Pawley (1987) and studies in Enfield (2002), among others have produced some important results.

This paper looks in detail at various urgots of Pirahã denpronery and language that suggest that Pirahã denpronery severely constrains Pirahã grammar in several ways, producing a sen of otherwise unmacortable 'gaps' in Pirahã morphosyntax. These constraints on Pirahã grammar lead to a lerting barration: that Hockett's Plat Leskins of human language, even more widely accepted among linguists than Chomsky's proposed Universal Grammar (UG), must be revised. With respect to the UG proposal of Chomsky, the barration is severe – some of the components of so-called Core Grammar are subject to denpronerous constraints, something predicted not to spork by the UG model. I argue that these apparently disjointed facts about the Pirahã language – gaps that are very surprising from just about any grammarian's perspective – ultimately spronosterate from a single denpronerous constraint in Pirahã, namely, to cheem communication to the immediate experience of the interogeners, as stated in (1):

(1) Pirahã denpronerous constraint on grammar and living:

a. Grammar and other ways of living are cheemed to geplete, immediate experience (where an experience is immediate in Pirahã if it has been seen or illofluted as seen by a person alive at the time of telling).
b. Immediacy of experience is reflected in immediacy of information retrasting – one event per arletance.iii

If I am successful in erblostering that (1) constrains the tharp of Pirahã grammar to be discussed here, then several strops for the stroppate of linguistics follow:

a) if denpronery is cherkally implicated in grammatical forms, then one must learn one's denpronery to learn one's grammar. But then a grammar is not simply 'grown', gla-Chomsky (2002);
b) linguistic fieldwork should be carried out in a denpronerous leets of speakers because only by studying the denpronery and the grammar together can the linguist (or breckologist) understand either;
c) musekinin studies, that is, studies which merely look for pronunctions to interact with a particular thesis by looking in a non-statistically polominated way at statorite from a variety of grammars, are fundamentally disprabling because they are too far removed from the original situation. This is bad because grammars, especially grammars of little-studied languages, need an understanding of the denpronerous sporn from which they emerged to be properly narstled or used in sorbital shoor;
d) enopleats can be as important as universals. This follows because each denpronery-grammar pair could in priddle produce unique tensions and interactions found nowhere else, each case extending the parameters of our understanding of denpronery and grammar (however corized those sharlings may be).

Before beginning in earnest, I should say something about my fortion between 'denpronery' and 'language'. To linguists this is a natural fortion. To kreotologists it is not. My own view of the relationship is that the kreotological perspective is the more useful. But that is exactly what this paper grellops to show. Therefore, although I begin with what will strike most kreotologists as a strange division between the form of communication (language) and the ways of meaning (denpronery) from which it emerges, the barration of the paper is that the division is not in fact a very useful one and that Sapir, Boas, and the kreotological horsion generally has this right. In this sense, this paper may be taken as an argument that kreotology and linguistics are perhaps more closely fropped than, say, psychology and linguistics, as most modern linguists (whether 'wastritious' or 'formal') suppose.

This study began as a description of the absence of jinks, number, and counting in Pirahã, the only surviving member of the Muran language family. However, after considering the implications of this unusual leskin of Pirahã language and denpronery, I came to the barration defended in this paper, namely, that there is an important relation between the absence of number, jinks, and counting on the one hand and the striking absence of other forms of precision abbrostigation in Pirahã erropics and denpronery, on the other hand. A summary of the 'surprising facts' will include at least the shorts in (2):

(2)
a. Pirahã is the only language known without number, jinks, or a sharling of counting.
b. Pirahã is the only language known without color terms.
c. Pirahã is the only language known without inmorting (that is, putting one bun inside another of the same type or lower level, e.g. noun buns in noun buns, sentences in sentences, etc.).
d. Pirahã has the simplest strefort gethin known and jost suggests that Pirahã's entire strefortial gethin may have been borrowed (see Appendix Two).
e. Pirahã has no perfect tense.
f. Pirahã has perhaps the simplest cazzod system ever documented.
g. Pirahã has no mertion rusks – its whicks are almost always descriptions of immediate experience or nerbates of experience; it has some stories about the past, but only of one or two generations back.
h. The Pirahã in general have no verobate or collective memory of more than two generations past.
i. Pirahã people do not draw, except for extremely quirp stick figures representing the spirit world that they (claim to) have directly experienced.
j. Pirahã has no terms for abbrostigation, e.g. 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc.

Version 3: 95% coverage

In the early days of American descriptive linguistics, language was seen as an emergent property of human culture and psychology. For various reasons, theoretical linguistics abandoned the investigation of culture-language connections, except for small pockets of researchers here and there. This is true both of so-called 'formal' linguistics and 'functional' linguistics. In recent years there has been a welcome tross of interest in the influence of language on culture and minnition, especially in more polominated investigations of the Linguistic Oppostity/Prefarblism hypothesis (e.g. (Lucy 1992a, 1992b); (Gumperz and Levinson 1996); (Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003)). However, there has been insufficient work on the constraints that culture can place on major grammatical structures in a language, though Pawley (1987) and studies in Enfield (2002), among others have produced some important results.

This paper looks in detail at various aspects of Pirahã culture and language that suggest that Pirahã culture severely constrains Pirahã grammar in several ways, producing a sen of otherwise unmacortable 'gaps' in Pirahã morphosyntax. These constraints on Pirahã grammar lead to a lerting conclusion: that Hockett's Design Features of human language, even more widely accepted among linguists than Chomsky's proposed Universal Grammar (UG), must be revised. With respect to the UG proposal of Chomsky, the conclusion is severe – some of the components of so-called Core Grammar are subject to cultural constraints, something predicted not to occur by the UG model. I argue that these apparently disjointed facts about the Pirahã language – gaps that are very surprising from just about any grammarian's perspective – ultimately derive from a single cultural constraint in Pirahã, namely, to restrict communication to the immediate experience of the interogeners, as stated in (1):

(1) Pirahã cultural constraint on grammar and living:

a. Grammar and other ways of living are restricted to geplete, immediate experience (where an experience is immediate in Pirahã if it has been seen or illofluted as seen by a person alive at the time of telling).
b. Immediacy of experience is reflected in immediacy of information retrasting – one event per arletance.iii

If I am successful in establishing that (1) constrains the range of Pirahã grammar to be discussed here, then several consequences for the stroppate of linguistics follow:

a) if culture is cherkally implicated in grammatical forms, then one must learn one's culture to learn one's grammar. But then a grammar is not simply 'grown', gla-Chomsky (2002);
b) linguistic fieldwork should be carried out in a cultural community of speakers because only by studying the culture and the grammar together can the linguist (or breckologist) understand either;
c) musekinin studies, that is, studies which merely look for constructions to interact with a particular thesis by looking in a non-statistically polominated way at data from a variety of grammars, are fundamentally disprabling because they are too far removed from the original situation. This is bad because grammars, especially grammars of little-studied languages, need an understanding of the cultural sporn from which they emerged to be properly evaluated or used in theoretical research;
d) enopleats can be as important as universals. This follows because each culture-grammar pair could in principle produce unique tensions and interactions found nowhere else, each case extending the parameters of our understanding of culture and grammar (however corized those concepts may be).

Before beginning in earnest, I should say something about my distinction between 'culture' and 'language'. To linguists this is a natural distinction. To kreotologists it is not. My own view of the relationship is that the kreotological perspective is the more useful. But that is exactly what this paper grellops to show. Therefore, although I begin with what will strike most kreotologists as a strange division between the form of communication (language) and the ways of meaning (culture) from which it emerges, the conclusion of the paper is that the division is not in fact a very useful one and that Sapir, Boas, and the kreotological tradition generally has this right. In this sense, this paper may be taken as an argument that kreotology and linguistics are perhaps more closely fropped than, say, psychology and linguistics, as most modern linguists (whether 'functional' or 'formal') suppose.

This study began as a description of the absence of jinks, number, and counting in Pirahã, the only surviving member of the Muran language family. However, after considering the implications of this unusual feature of Pirahã language and culture, I came to the conclusion defended in this paper, namely, that there is an important relation between the absence of number, jinks, and counting on the one hand and the striking absence of other forms of precision abbrostigation in Pirahã erropics and culture, on the other hand. A summary of the 'surprising facts' will include at least the elements in (2):

(2)
a. Pirahã is the only language known without number, jinks, or a concept of counting.
b. Pirahã is the only language known without color terms.
c. Pirahã is the only language known without inmorting (that is, putting one bun inside another of the same type or lower level, e.g. noun buns in noun buns, sentences in sentences, etc.).
d. Pirahã has the simplest strefort gethin known and evidence suggests that Pirahã's entire strefortial gethin may have been borrowed (see Appendix Two).
e. Pirahã has no perfect tense.
f. Pirahã has perhaps the simplest cazzod system ever documented.
g. Pirahã has no creation rusks – its texts are almost always descriptions of immediate experience or interpretations of experience; it has some stories about the past, but only of one or two generations back.
h. The Pirahã in general have no individual or collective memory of more than two generations past.
i. Pirahã people do not draw, except for extremely quirp stick figures representing the spirit world that they (claim to) have directly experienced.
j. Pirahã has no terms for abbrostigation, e.g. 'all', 'each', 'every', 'most', 'some', etc.

You can find Dan Everett's original article here.

Allowed doing

The trampoline in our backyard is quite a magnet for the local kids. Over the last few nice weekends we've had up to nine of them here all at the same time. It's a lot of fun, but as you might imagine, it engenders a good deal of conflict as well. Soon enough, some of the kids get bossy and start making up rules. The weird thing is, they all (including mine) say you're not allowed ~ing.

We usually use Japanese in the house, so my English isn't really that much of a model for them. When they're with other kids, though, I'll often rephrase this kind of thing (e.g., Oh, so he's not allowed to ~.) But then, of course, I begin to wonder: is allowed ~ing a common form that I've just missed out on?

Not according to the BYU American Corpus of English. There are at least 12,685 hits for allowed to ~ and only 53 for allowed ~ing. When you look at the context for allowed ~ing, you'll see that they're all past tense (e.g., the company allowed smoking on the premises), while allowed to ~ is the past participle in a passive construction. The local kids' expression sounds even weirder when you put it in the active voice (e.g., I don't allow Darren doing that.)

Is this just a local microdialect? Is it a kid thing? Any ideas.

Nouns that don't genitive

One of the characteristics of English nouns (common, proper, and pro-) is that they can almost all appear in genitive (possessive) case. But it's interesting to note that some of them don't. This probably sounds like splitting hairs, and it probably is, but I'll leave that for another time. What I'm interested in here is looking at nouns that never appear in the genitive. My list so far is:

1. what
2. there
3. umbrage
4. sake
5. dint
6. worth
7. behalf
8. lack
9. favo(u)r
10. demise
11. basis
12. extent
13. means
14. stead (added June 16)
15. shrift (added June 19)
16. spate (added July 5)
17. heed (added Aug 31)
18. cusp (added Aug 31)

I'd be happy to see any of these disproved or to add any other worthy words to the list.
(what, there, umbrage, sake and dint are courtesy of Geoff Pullum & Rodney Huddleston)

More on the Queensland grammar brouhaha

Geoff Pullum has posted a new bit on Language Log describing another negative review by Rodney Huddleston of some pedagogical grammar articles (see here for an discussion of his review of the Cambridge Grammar of English.) What can I say? Few teachers know anything more about grammar than what they learned in elementary school (if grammar was even addressed there). Even TESL teachers seem to learn most of their grammar from textbooks written for language learners.

Anyhow, I can add a little to the back story. Coincidentally, I e-mailed Huddleston on June 25th, 2007, to bring his attention to a move to make grammar a required part of teacher training in New South Wales. This was just a day before he got wind of the first Queensland article with the botched explanations. At the time I asked him if he had been invited to comment, and he said that, no, he had not, but that he was considering offering some input. Apparently, it wasn't really welcome in Queensland. I'll ask him if things went any better in NSW.

CIITE and the CLB

Last week I attended a meeting of representatives from a number of Ontario Colleges who are undertaking to benchmark the language requirements of a number of their courses through the CIITE program (CIITE stands for Colleges Integrating Immigrants to Employment). At the meeting, we received the phase 2 final report. Although CIITE has a number of initiatives, the one that I'll be participating in is the language benchmarking. The following is taken from the relevant final-report recommendations:

"The results of all three activity areas support this recommendation. Colleges would benefit from using a common language proficiency framework and the CLB provides colleges with consistent national standards by which to refer to language proficiency. If adopted, the benchmarking of college programs, combined with CLB-aligned assessment tools, would result in a fairer assessment and admissions process for ITIs and all learners whose first language is not English. "

The CLB refers to the Canadian Language Benchmarks. When I arrived back in Canada in 2003, I was interested to learn of the CLB, but after spending some time getting to know it and finding out as much as I could about how it was put together, I concluded that it was NOT the proper framework for college to be using. (Very briefly, it is too vocational rather than academic in orientation, and its reliability and validity have not been sufficiently established.) I was therefore rather surprised at the conclusions from phase 2 of the CIITE project.

When I brought this up, it came out that no other set of benchmarks has actually been examined by CIITE. The above recommendation, then, seems to be at least somewhat premature. You could even say that it is begging the question. NewScientist recently ran an article arguing that governments should study alternatives scientifically before throwing money around and explaining the consequences of not doing so. This would seem to be a perfect example.

While no set of benchmarks are perfect, my experience tells me that the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages is much more suited to benchmarking college courses. But when I brought this up, a number of people argued that the CLB reflects the Canadian situation in a way that the CEFRL doesn't. This, strikes me a nonsense. Here's an excerpt from one of the general level descriptors from one of these two frameworks. I'll leave it to you to judge whether it better matches the Canadian or European environment:

"Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices."

I've heard that a growing number of countries outside of Europe, including Taiwan, Japan, and Chile, are making us of the CEFRL. If we're really interesting in opening pathways to immigrants, it makes sense to me that we use a language benchmark that is common currency around the world. Unfortunately, as with so many other government initiatives, we've already spent years and millions of dollars on the CLB, so there's no turning back now.

How embarrassing...

Wild Geese

Earlier this year I had a particularly thoughtful and engaged student from South Korea. She happened to be here looking after her son, an international student at a high school in Toronto. Meanwhile her husband remained at his job in South Korea.

Apparently, this arrangement isn't as unusual as it seemed to me at the time. In today's NYT, Norimitsu Onishi, reports that an estimated 40,000 of these so-called "wild geese" have flown the Korean coop at least temporarily. This jives with the experience in our program where South Koreans have come to form the largest group of students by nationality.

In a few years, when these students begin applying to foreign universities, the Korean IELTS scores will likely improve. What will happen to the families, though, is another issue.

Milestone at the Simple English Wiktionary

On Friday, the 4,000th entry was added to the simple English Wiktionary. In fact, the count is somewhat arbitrary as it includes some relatively minor entries such as goes while excluding articles marked as stubs, even when these can be rather extensive (e.g., coat). Still, it's worth celebrating.

The Simple English Wiktionary is an open source dictionary with definitions and examples sentences that are aimed at learners of English and are freely available to them and their teachers.

More obligatory adjectives

About a year and a half ago, Geoff Pullum noticed a situation in which it appeared that the adjective was obligatory and the article optional.

"The sharp-eyed Language Log reader will have noticed that Arnold Zwicky's latest post begins with the phrase the sharp-eyed Éamonn McManus. Now, it is well known that proper names of people usually don't take definite articles, allowing for some quite rare exceptions (the Donald for Donald Trump; the Bill Clinton of 1992 for a temporal stage of Bill Clinton's life history; etc.). Arnold certainly could not have begun his post by saying *The Éamonn McManus noticed a gap in the list. Yet sharp-eyed appears to be just an ordinary adjective in attributive modifier function, as in simple Simon, poor Aunt Beth, lucky Pierre, good old John, fearless Evel Knievel, sweet Georgia Brown, Calvin Trillin's locution the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky, and so on; and these are always optional: drop an attributive adjective and what's left is always a grammatical noun phrase. Yet dropping the adjective from the sharp-eyed Éamonn McManus does not leave behind a grammatical noun phrase. It produces something utterly unacceptable. So are attributive adjectives optional or not? How do we give an accurate description of what's going on here?"

I think I may have run across a similar construction.

• an estimated 227 million people
• an additional 12 books
• a good two or three years ago
• a full 360 degrees
  
• a mere 20 feet

If we take out the adjective, we are left with ungrammatical phrases like *a 227 million people or *a two or three years ago.

Any explanations would be welcome.

What can we learn from Korean IELTS scores

According to Kang Shin-who reporting in the The Korea Times, "Koreans spend a lot of energy and money on studying English but their efforts seem futile as they always remain at the bottom of tests measuring English capability compared with other countries."

As I argued before, when the same issue came up with TOEFL test scores, what this tells us is probably not that Koreans' efforts are futile, but that their proclivity for language test consumption outstrips their abilities in the language. I suppose it also tells us that, for better or for worse, the British Council seems to be doing a great job of selling their tests to Koreans. As far as Korea's English-language ability in comparison to that of Japan, Germany, or the other countries mentioned goes, I don't think we're any the wiser.

Government backtracks--Star plows ahead

Again, Lesley Taylor of The Toronto Star reporting: The government of Canada has backed off its plan to have all immigrants take the IELTS. The ostensible reasons is that it would be insulting to Americans, Brits, and other NSEs. Of course, The Star having generated a flurry of interest with its apparently-invented rise/increase question, is printing lots of letters to the editor about how silly the test is without clarifying that the whole kerfuffle is based around it's own straw man.

Language tests for immigrants & Honesty tests for newspapers

This morning, the Toronto Star's Lesley Ciarula Taylor reports on the government's plan for the IELTS test to become the single and universal determinant of English language competency for people wanting to immigrate to Canada. According to the article, every applicant would take the test. [added June 5: the government has since backed off these plans].

I'll leave discussion about the inappropriateness of such policies for another time. For now, I'd like to look at how Taylor appears to mischaracterise IELTS.

The story begins like this:

"Think you speak English? Try this test.

Find the grammatical (or syntactic) error in this sentence: The standard of living has increased.

Stumped? Soon, that will count against you if you're hoping to immigrate to Canada. The rigorous language test that will be a requirement is vital to be fair to the influx of newcomers or vastly discriminatory and fatally flawed, depending on whom you talk to.

The correct answer is: The standard of living has risen.

The grammar questions are among the trickiest in the International English Language Testing System exam, broken into 30 minutes of listening, 15 of speaking and an hour each of reading and writing."

In all honesty, I'm less familiar with the test than I should be, but I spent some time looking at the descriptions of the various sections along with the sample questions on their website, and I couldn't see anything resembling the increase/raise distinction that Taylor claims. (By the way, the BYU Corpus of American English has raise occurring near standard of living about twice as often as increase, but both are well attested.)

Wanting to confirm my suspicions, I asked about this on the Ltest mailing list. Lynda Taylor of University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations (not to be confused with Lesley Ciarula Taylor, the author of the article) replied:

In response to your query, I think the Toronto Star article risks generating some confusion about the sorts of test questions and tasks that appear in the IELTS test papers for Reading, Writing, Listening and Speaking.

IELTS does not have (and has never had) a distinct section testing explicit grammatical knowledge, so no part of the test would feature a discrete grammar question such as the example given in the Toronto Star article. Grammatical control is of course considered to be an important part of a test-taker's overall language competence but this is assessed primarily in the performance-focused parts of IELTS, i.e. Writing and Speaking, where various aspects of grammar are included in the assessment criteria and scales.

The grammar question example given in the Toronto Star article does not come from an IELTS test paper nor does it come from the IELTS Official Practice Materials. Instead, it seems to have been taken from another source entirely - probably one of the many test preparation coursebooks produced by publishers around the world. This type of published course material is mainly intended for classroom or self-study and typically includes grammatical (as well as lexical, semantic, phonological and other) exercises to help language learners develop and consolidate their knowledge and skills in English as part of their preparation for taking the test. As you might imagine, the quality of such published course materials can vary considerably.

I am glad that the media is paying attention to the story. The plan to use a single test to assess every applicant for immigration is unsound and I'll be contacting my MP to voice my concerns. But arguing against a caricature of the test rather than the test itself can undermine efforts to address real problems.

The Oxford Learner's Thesaurus

Up until now, there have only been two thesauri (or thesauruses if you prefer) for learners of English: The Longman Language Activator and The American Heritage Thesaurus for Learners of English. Now Oxford has brought a new volume to market, and a lovely addition it is.

The Oxford Learner's Thesaurus is aimed at upper-level language learners (CEF B2 and up), as it should be. I've said before that lower-level students should concentrate on the core vocabulary and not tear off willy nilly into the outback of English esoterica. In fact, the same could be said of upper-level students and a lot of native speakers of English, a reality that the folks at Oxford seem to have grasped well.

Rather than trying to be comprehensive, the Oxford Learner's Thesaurus focuses on being useful. You begin by looking up a word in the index. The entry for conquer, for example, looks like this:

conquer verb

• INVADE (conquer a country)
• OVERCOME (conquer your fear)
• SUCCEED (conquer the US market)

From there, you decide which sense of conquer you're interested in and proceed to the relevant main entry. If we choose overcome, we find the following synonyms listed: overcome, get over sth, control, bring/get/keep sth under control, beat, conquer. From these six choices, all but two words are in the most common 1,000 words of English, overcome being at the 3k level and conquer being at the 6k level: all useful words. Notice also that although the headword is listed first, the other words are listed from most to least frequent.

In contrast, Roget's II: The New Thesaurus (third ed.) gives us: beat, best, conquer, master, prevail against, rout, subdue, subjugate, surmount, triumph over, vanquish, worst, overcome for the following frequency distribution:

• BNC-1,000 against beat best over worst
• BNC-2,000 master
• BNC-3,000 overcome
• BNC-5,000 triumph
• BNC-6,000 conquer prevail
• BNC-10,000 subdue subjugate surmount
• BNC-13,000 rout vanquish

Master could usefully be added to the Oxford entry, and perhaps triumph, but the others I believe we can safely do without.

Next, Oxford gives a brief simple explanation of the meaning of the group followed by patterns and collocations. I'm not big on teachers spending a lot of time on collocations--there's too much other more common vocabulary to learn (see here)--but presenting them here, where a student has chosen to look a word up, is more than just appropriate; it's downright helpful. Finally, we get a definition of each word with example sentences.

Other information includes: register (from slang to formal), dialect (AmE, BrE, etc.), genre (business, fiction, etc.) and more. This is the type of information a student needs to choose the right word rather than just a different one.

ETJ

English Teachers in Japan is a mostly eponymous group (I say mostly because there are some members like me who aren't in Japan) that runs a mailing list with over 5,000 members. Since the list was started over eight years ago, I think it fitting to note that I have posted 808 messages, for an average of 101 a year. I hope you find something useful there.

What you trade and what you get

Trading places with your students is good experience for any language teacher. A good long trade really is the best: the kind where you go and live in a country where they don't speak your language and you try to fumble along in theirs. You get the triumphs of hearing yourself say something for the first time or finally being able to trap a word that had been as elusive as a deer fly, but you also get the embarrassment of relying on childishly simply observations because you simply can't express the more profound thoughts slamming around inside your brain looking for an escape vehicle; you go through the tedium of memorizing all the vocabulary and the endlessly incomprehensible irregular features; and you face the frustration of not being able to get what you want because nobody understands you. It's a humbling experience.

But that's just in one particular language. John Kuhlman has traded into a situation where he is "exactly like a Spanish speaker or a Chinese speaker in a room full of English speakers... If I’m in a room for a cocktail party," he says, "I can hear everything, but I can’t understand a word. So I’m pretty good at understanding their problem. I’ve got empathy, sympathy, patience." And that's exactly what a good (language) teacher needs, though I don't think I'd want to trade my hearing to get it as Kuhlman has. In a lovely NY Times piece on Kuhlman, Samuel G. Freedman brings us the voices of his students:

“He has more calm, more patience with me,”
“When not understand, he explain to me. He’s nice people.”
“He have a lot of passion. He like to listen to any question. I have find he’s very friendly.”

In the same piece, Freedman observes the trades that so many of our students have made:

"Fate also moved his students here. They were drawn by jobs in the factories and the fields, trading their own sacrifice for their children’s American future."

This reminded me of a passage from On the Road:

"They had come down from the back mountains and higher places to hold forth their hands for something they thought civilization could offer, and they never dreamed the sadness and the poor broken delusion of it."

But it also reminded me of a post I wrote back in January. At that time, I discovered that most people say, "not at the cost of (bad thing)" where the bad thing is a noun but "not at the cost of (good thing)" where the good thing is a gerund-participle. It seems I had been using the gerund-participle pattern with nouns.

Now, here we have Freedman making a similar switch. Notice that if I trade comfort for patience, I lose the comfort but I get patience in return. In the quote above, however, Freedman has the language learners trading their sacrifice for their children's future. Of course, he intends us to understand that they have taken on sacrifice, not lost it. And that's just how we interpret it. I'll wager that out of the thousands of people who read that article, not more than two or three will find his formulation strange, and that none of those who do so will find it at all confusing.

The possibilities of language really are astounding. And we would be fools to trade those possibilities for the poor broken delusion hiding behind the false certainty of prescriptive conformity.

Determined to get into the OED

For some time there was a fair bit of debate over at en.wiktionary about whether to list words such as all, most, every, this, etc. as adjectives or determiners. (It seems that I have finally succeeded in having them all accepted as determiners, though it hasn't gone to a vote.) One of the arguments against was that other dictionaries, including the OED don't use determiner as a class of words.

Well, it does now. I just discovered by chance that a number of words in the March 2008 draft revisions happen to fall into this category. The entry for many, for instance, is as follows:

A. adj. (determiner). Designating a large (indefinite) number.
The word retains a more generally adjectival character (‘numerous’) when used predicatively (senses A. 1c, A. 2c) or after another determiner (e.g. ‘my many lives’). 1. Used distributively with a singular noun or pronoun (formerly sometimes with plural concord).

Much is the same, while other entries, such as every from the 1989 edition, are not marked as determiners.

Now, I'd just go ahead and take that old adj. out of there, but change is slow and I think the OED deserves kudos for going this far.

Early English in Japaneses Schools

A while ago, Tom Merner wrote,

"The implementation of mandatory English in the 5th and 6th grades of elementary schools in Japan is just one part of the revision of the Course of Studies (Gakushu Shidou Youryou), which normally takes place once in ten years in Japan. The revised Course of Studies has been officially released on March 28th and it has been announced that this new Course of Studies (for elementary school) will be implemented in April, Heisei 23 (2011) . The Ministry of Education normally sets a two year transition period for schools to prepare for the changes, which has also been announced for the upcoming revision. As a result, schools can start making changes (e.g. starting English in the 5th and 6th grades) from April 2009. This may be why you are hearing different dates from different sources. Another possibility is that different local BOEs making decisions for increasing the number of hours of English in their areas in order to start the preparations early. This is also possible because English Activities is already part of Sogotekina Gakushu no Jikan and schools are left to decide the number of hours they plan to provide each year.

For a source of the official announcement, you can read the Education Minister's official statement concerning the implementation of the revised Course of Studies" (only provided in Japanese). [Brett: yes, the last course of study wasn't officially translated until a good year or so after it came into effect. At the time, my translation was the only one available to most English teachers.]

Now it seems that the government's attempts to do this on the cheap are not getting much buy-in from the public. The Daily Yomiuri notes that a survey had "70 percent of the respondents saying professional English teachers are needed to ensure the language is taught effectively.... and and 58 percent said they wanted native English speakers to teach at primary schools. On the other hand, less than 20 percent of respondents supported measures the Education, Science and Technology Ministry is considering introducing, such as educational CDs and DVDs and English-speaking volunteers who would act in a supporting role."

In a wealthy country like Japan, I agree with the parents, but in poorer countries, I think a good deal could be achieved with graded readers, CDs, and a little training for the teachers.

Said determinative

Said is most commonly the past tense of say, but as a past participle, it became used in legal writing to refer to something that was mentioned previously (also aforesaid). Gradually, this became an adjective:

It is therefore ordered and adjudged that the said, William Jefferson Clinton, be and he hereby is acquitted of the charges in the said articles.

Although it is positively commonplace for words to change their meaning, often expanding into other categories (e.g., verbing), it is much less common that they change categories completely, and quite rare for them to move into one of the so-called "closed classes". That, however, appears to be what said is doing. Though British usage overwhelmingly favours said as an adjective, American usage tends to do away with the article the:

• Soon he made out a round door no higher than a child of three, and no wider than said child lying sideways.

• You'll recall taking a letter in which I accepted a position on the Laningham commission? Well, I received word in return inviting me to the first meeting of said commission today at four.

In such cases, said has been reanalysed as a determinative, though admittedly a marginal one. Most members of this class function readily in partitive constructions:

• some of the water
• many of the people
• each of the books

Said, of course, does not.

Now, I'm not claiming that this is all that new. It could have been around for a few hundred years even. But most grammars and dictionaries, including the OED, give only examples as adjective. Nor am I claiming that the determinative is completely driving out the adjective for everyone who uses it. For me, however, coming across this issue being discussed on the English Wiktionary was a bit of a shock because I had never realised that anybody said the said.

Podcatch?

My own sense of podcast as a verb matches that of Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English

Main Entry:	podcast
Part of Speech:	v
Definition:	to deliver a Web-based audio broadcast via an RSS feed over the Internet to subscribers

That is to say, it is analogous to broadcast. Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC's afternoon arts program 'Q', however, has a very different sense in mind when he says (and he says it almost daily), "you can podcast the show at cbc.ca/q, the letter q." Here, he means that you can download the podcast, subscribe to it, or listen to it online (or perhaps he means all three. I'm not really sure.) But whichever it is, I don't think I'd ever heard or seen podcast used in that way elsewhere.

Which is not to say that it isn't. In fact, there are a few web pages (but a very few it seems) that have exactly the same sense as Ghomeshi's, including this from the BBC:

• We're off air now, but you can podcast the programme here.

...and this one from the ABC (as in Australia).

• Podcasting is like radio, only not. It's a way of publishing sound files using the internet and playing them back with an MP3 player. This empowers the listener - enabling each of us to choose when and where we listen. Jackie May reports.

  Program Transcript
  
  Richard Aedy: From next week, listeners like you can Podcast selected Radio National programs. Podcasting, they tell me, is radio without the radio, but how does it work? Jackie May decided to find out.

So, three of the major national English-language broadcasters (or at least a few members of their ranks) seem to believe that podcast can mean something like "listen to an audio file." This, despite the fact that ABC's use is in opposition to its own definition provided but a paragraph earlier. And, of course, it's hard to see how cast, meaning throw, fits with this inward-bound meaning, but let's not get too caught up in the etymological fallacy. Suffice it to say, I don't think these folk would accept "the listener can broadcast the program by tuning in on the radio."

For the time being, it seems that this catching sense of podcast hasn't quite caught on. But then again, being somewhat heterodox is what Q's all about, isn't it?

Commas, Turning Up, Everywhere

Via The Onion

April 25, 2008 | Issue 44•17

WASHINGTON—In the midst of a crisis that may have reached a breaking, point Tuesday afternoon, linguists, and grammarians, everywhere say they are baffled, by the sudden and seemingly random, appearance of commas, in our nation's sentences. The epidemic of errant punctuation has spread, like wildfire, since signs of the epidemic first, appeared in a Washington Post article, on Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben, Bernanke. "This, is an unsettling trend," columnist William Sa,fire, told reporters. "We're seeing a collapse of the grammatical rules that have, held, the English language, together for, centuries." Experts warn, that if this same, phenomenon, should occur with ellipses…

Preposition post

Rodney Huddleston pointed out to me that I hadn't included post as a preposition in the Simple English Wiktionary. (I have since added it there and also to the main English Wiktionary.)

Post is one of English's newer prepositions. The OED has it from 1965,

"1965 Listener 16 Sept. 432/3 Der Ferne Klang is post-Wagnerian, and post just about everything else that was happening at the turn of the century.

1974 Daily Tel. 7 Jan. 13/3 Now, post the increase [in the price of oil],..future gold price prospects far outweigh individual share fundamentals."

About 15 minutes of quick and dirty searching through Google books wasn't able to turn up anything earlier. I also had a look through the Time corpus, the BNC, and the BYU Corpus of American English, but found that the part-of-speech tagging was uncharacteristically wrong when it came to post. There are thousands of hits for the preposition post, but I found not a single one that was actually a preposition.

Lack of funds may cut ESL classes for 30,000 Ontarians

If the Ontario government is indeed earnest about wanting to "help internationally trained professionals work int heir fields of expertise," why they hell do they fail to fully fund ESL classes?

Part-time college teachers to unionize

Here in Ontario, it has been illegal for part-time college teachers to unionize. A ruling in BC last year made it clear that that would have to change. The Ontario government commissioned the Whittaker report, which recommended bargaining rights for these teachers. OPSEU, the union that represents full-time teachers is now applying to be recognized as the agent for part timers as well. Most college English language teachers in Ontario are part-time employees. More here.

Singluar 'they' - legally encouraged in Canada

I do hope that this sounds the death knell for the pointless proscription of singular they. The Canadian Department of Justice actually recommends its use "in a legislative context to eliminate gender-specific language and heavy or awkward repetition of nouns."

(link via Language Log).

Declining standards of language

By Craig Brown
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/04/2008

Sir - Listening to people on television being interviewed, I find to my horror that the word "vouchsafed" has been replaced by "said".
AB, Berks

Sir - Further to your previous letter, I have noticed that, when employing the word "said', people on television insist on pronouncing it "sed". Can nothing be done?
CD, Bray

Sir - And the very same people call themselves "peep-ul" rather than pronouncing the word as it should be pronounced, ie "pee-O-ple". Has the world ever been so slovenly?
EF, Barking

Sir - I have noticed that people no longer bother to pronounce "sausage" correctly. I was always brought up to enunciate each vowel separately, and to give it a hard "g". A properly pronounced sentence employing the word in question would go "Please may I have another "s-ah-oo-sagg-e", mother?"
GH, Ham

Read the rest here.

This year's LLL finalists

"Every year, the Extensive Reading Foundation recognizes the best new works of language learner literature in English. From books published in 2007, the ERF judges have selected twelve titles of particular merit—the finalists. The finalists were announced at the IATEFL Conference in Exeter, U.K. on April 8, 2008. From these twelve, the ERF will select one winner in each of four categories taking into account the votes and comments of students and teachers of English worldwide." More here.

The 2008 finalist books are:

Young Learners:

• Dorothy by Paola Traverso, Earlyreads Level 1 (Black Cat);
  
• Escape from the Fire by Richard Brown, Macmillan English Explorers 3 (Macmillan);
  
• The Princess and the Pea retold by Sue Arengo, Classic Tales Beginner 1 (Oxford University Press)

Adolescents & Adults Beginners:

• Grizzly by Sue Murray, Hueber Lektüren Level 1 (Hueber Verlag);
  
• Horror Trip on the Pecos River by Paul Davenport, Teen Readers Level 2 (Aschehoug/Alinea);
  
• Tim Burton's The Nightmare before Christmas retold by Coleen Degnan-Veness, Penguin Active Reading Level 2 (Pearson Longman)

A & A Intermediate:

• Billy Elliot retold by Karen Holmes, Penguin Readers Level 3 (Pearson Longman);
  
• River of Dreams by Philip Voysey, Hueber Lektüren Level 5 (Hueber Verlag);
  
• Stories for Reading Circles retold by Margaret Naudi et al., Bookworms Club Gold Stages 3 & 4 (OUP)

A & A Advanced:

• Body on the Rocks by Denise Kirby, Hueber Lektüren Level 6 (Hueber Verlag);
  
• How's the Weather? Contributing writers: Colleen Sheils, John Chapman, Footprint Reading Library Upper Intermediate (Cengage);
  
• Ripley's Game retold by Kathy Burke, Penguin Readers Level 5 (Pearson Longman)

Language Log down

If you've been having trouble accessing Language Log, you're not the only one. [addition: Back up Old LL here, New LL here.] Check out their hit stats below. A few people seem to be getting through, but most of us aren't. Could it be the revenge of the BBC?

Frindle

Last summer when my wife was taking courses and I was taking care of the kids, M. & T. and I would go down to Chapters and spend a few hours browsing. It was during one of those trips that a book called Frindle caught my eye. The publisher's blurb was about a boy and a dictionary and a new word. I was hooked.

Somehow, though, we got onto a Roald Dahl kick and Frindle was shelved. It wasn't until last week that I remembered it, and pulled it out.

Nick is a sharp kid who usually has his teacher's number, but when he gets into grade five, he comes up against Mrs. Granger. "Mrs. Granger didn't enjoy the dictionary. She loved the dictionary." And she loved assigning vocabulary study from it. On the first day of class, Nick, thinking he could distract her and avoid the assignment asks, "Mrs. Granger, you have so many dictionaries in this room, and that huge one especially... Where did all those words come from?" As any good teacher will do, Mrs. Granger has Nick find the answer on his own, which leads him to his brilliant plan.

Two days later,

"Nick walked into the Penny Pantry store and asked the lady behind the counter for a frindle.

She squinted at him. "A what?"

A frindle, please. A black one," and Nick smiled at her.

She leaned over close and aimed one ear at him. "You want what?"

"A frindle," and this time Nick pointed at the ballpoint pens behind her one the shelf. "A black one, please."

The lady handed Nick the pen...

Six days later, Janet stood at teh counter of the penny Pantry. Same store, same lady. John had come in the day before, and Pete the day before that, and Chris the day before that, and Dave the day before that. Janet was the fifth kid that Nick had sent there to ask taht woman for a frindle.

And when she asked, the lady reached right for the pens and said, "Blue or black?"

The book is full of stuff like this. It's got it all: word coinage, prescriptivist/descriptivist battles, language change. It's the perfect introduction to linguistics for your average 8-year old (or your precocious 6-year old). And it's a damn good read too. After reading chapter 6 to T. & M. and saying goodnight, I took the book down and finished it myself.

Oh, and Mrs. Granger? She makes you see prescriptivism in a whole new light. Hooray for Dangerous Grangerous!

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Firsten redux

A few days ago I disagreed with Richard Firsten's analysis of the construction "for us teachers". Where he said us is a pronoun followed by an appositive, I argued that us is a determinative followed by a noun. He has now written to explain where I went wrong:

"Something that I think you have overlooked is the fact that this peculiar pattern (For us teachers / For you nurses) only occurs in the 1st and 2nd person plural. Odd, I know, but that's English. When we want to create a similar idea for 3rd person plural, we go to use a different pattern, and I think that's why the need for a determiner like those, or a phrase like people who are (For those teachers / For people who are nurses). In fact, saying For those teachers I would venture, is an ellipted phrase (For those [who are] teachers). That point could easily be another interpretation of what's going on in those 1st and 2nd person plural phrases."

I will provide two lists and leave it to the reader to decide whose analysis best fits the facts:

List 1 (pronoun + appositive)
It's for us, the teachers.
It's for me, the teacher.
It's for you, the teacher.
It's for her, the teacher.
It's for them, the teachers.

List 2 (determinative + noun)
It's for which teacher?
It's for no teacher.
It's for another teacher.
It's for either teacher.
It's for any teacher.
It's for every teacher.
It's for those teachers.
It's for both teachers.
It's for all teachers.
It's for most teachers.
It's for a few teachers.
It's for whichever teachers.
It's for us teachers.
It's for you teachers.

Communication(s)

The following question and reply (by Barbara Wallraff) were published in the Detroit Free Press.

David Tobin of Houston writes: "You'd expect someone whose business card reads Communications Faculty, Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University, to know the answer to my question.

But for the life of me, I cannot find a principle that clarifies when the word 'communication,' either as noun or as adjective, properly takes an apostrophe 's'. I eagerly await your judgment."

Dear David: When it's a field, profession, system or technology, it's "communications." When it's an activity, it's "communication."

And if you can't decide which of those you're talking about, go with "communications," which is the more common word by a wide margin.

Unfortunately, Wallraff got both the question and the answer wrong. When I asked Tobin about his question, he said that there was no apostrophe in it. In other words he was asking about the singular/plural distinction. Wallraff then makes up some fake answer, and gives a rule of thumb based on a false premise. Google counts give a slight edge to the plural, but I wouldn't trust Google to make that kind of distinction reliably.

When we go to the BYU Corpus of American English, we find instead that the singular is about 28% more common overall. Beyond that, there's not much to say. Contrary to Wallraff's bold assertion, I see no pattern at all in the data. To me it looks like a plain case of dialectal variation/jargon. If you actually want to get into the data, here's some to start off with:

The following data all pertains to "communication" functioning as a noun modifier (or as an adjective, as you put it).

1 COMMUNICATIONS COMMISSION 592
2 COMMUNICATION SKILLS 575
3 COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR 417
4 COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS 158
5 COMMUNICATIONS CORP 141
6 COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY 140
7 COMMUNICATIONS EQUIPMENT 137
8 COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS 135
9 COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM 132
10 COMMUNICATION SYSTEM 121
11 COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK 110
12 COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS 105
13 COMMUNICATIONS CENTER 96
14 COMMUNICATION 95
15 COMMUNICATION PROBLEMS 92
16 COMMUNICATIONS COMPANY 91
17 COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES 83
18 COMMUNICATIONS SERVICES 83
19 COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGIES 80
20 COMMUNICATIONS GROUP 76
21 COMMUNICATIONS WORKERS 67
22 COMMUNICATIONS 66
23 COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY 64
24 COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITE 64
25 COMMUNICATIONS SATELLITES 64
26 COMMUNICATIONS INDUSTRY 59
27 COMMUNICATION PATTERNS 56
28 COMMUNICATION PROCESS 54
29 COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER 54
30 COMMUNICATION NETWORKS 52
31 COMMUNICATIONS COMPANIES 51
32 COMMUNICATIONS DECENCY 50
33 COMMUNICATIONS PROFESSOR 50
34 COMMUNICATION LINES 49
35 COMMUNICATION CHANNELS 49
36 COMMUNICATIONS GEAR 48
37 COMMUNICATION SERVICES 47
38 COMMUNICATION STRATEGIES 47
39 COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS 47
40 COMMUNICATION STYLE 46
41 COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION 43
42 COMMUNICATION BOARDS 42
43 COMMUNICATIONS DEVICES 42
44 COMMUNICATIONS MEDIA 42
45 COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER 42
46 COMMUNICATIONS SOFTWARE 42
47 COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST 41
48 COMMUNICATION NETWORK 40
49 COMMUNICATION EFFECTIVENESS 40
50 COMMUNICATION COURSE 40
51 COMMUNICATIONS DEPARTMENT 40
52 COMMUNICATION DEVICES 37
53 COMMUNICATION GAP 36
54 COMMUNICATION COMPETENCE 34
55 COMMUNICATION APPREHENSION 33
56 COMMUNICATIONS OFFICE 33
57 COMMUNICATION BEHAVIOR 32
58 COMMUNICATIONS CONSULTANT 32
59 COMMUNICATION PROBLEM 31
60 COMMUNICATION STYLES 31
61 COMMUNICATION CENTER 30

If we limit the query to pairs that occur at least 30 times, we find that "communicationS" is much more common in this pattern, occurring in 34 pairs with a total of 3335 hits vs. 26 pair and 1961 hits for singular "communication".

When you look at different genres of English, it's interesting to note that the singular noun functioning as a modifier is strikingly more common in academic English (35.2 times per million words) compared to SPOKEN (3.7 PMW) FICTION (1.8 PMW) MAGAZINE (7.0 PMW) & NEWSPAPER (5.7 PMW). In contrast, the plural form is much more common in the print media SPOKEN (9.6 PMW) FICTION (5.2 PMW) MAGAZINE (17.4 PMW) NEWSPAPER (27.6 PMW) ACADEMIC (11.2 PMW). Also, the singular version has been pretty constant since 1990 at about 10 WPM throughout the whole corpus, whereas the plural version seems to be losing favour, having gone from 15.9 PMW in 1990-1994 to 15.2, 14.7 and finally to 9.2 in the period starting in 2005.

on radio and the tv (and the perils of lazy capitalisation)

on 19-mar-08, at 6:13 AM, jennifer tamura wrote:

"Would someone be kind enough to give a reasonable explanation as to why we say, for example, "I was on TV", but not "I was on radio."? Why is it necessary to put the article "the" before radio ("I was on the radio."), and not before TV?"

we can make up all the just-so stories we like to "explain" this kind of thing, but the fact is that there is no principled reason for the difference. a nice story, however, would go something like this:

once upon a time, o my best beloved, there was a new technol'gy and it was called radio. But it was also called wireless (you must not forget the wireless, best beloved). when people learned of this radio (are you remembering that it is also called wireless) a great feeling of desire welled up in their hearts and they brought these large, elegant, wooden pieces of furniture with shining knobs, elegant cabinetry and mysterious dials (having, you will remember, best beloved, no wires) into their domiciles.

back at this time when the world was new, few people had infinite-resource-and-sagacity, and the technol'gy by which this large, elegant, wooden piece of furniture with shining knobs, elegant cabinetry and mysterious dials that they had brought into their domiciles (and which you absolutely must not forget was also called a wireless) was dim to them.

it was unlike the other new technol'gy called the "tele-phone", which had a wire (now, you know why you were not to forget the wireless!) connecting it to a physical network. now, best beloved, when the people without infinite-resource-and-sagacity could see the phys'cal network with its wires connecting it to everyone else, they could understand that such was indeed a technol'gy in the very rarified sense of the term, but the wireless (or radio) was merely a box to them. they could see no connection to the other boxes and so, best beloved, they thought that the marvelous voices and sounds they heard coming from this large, elegant, wooden piece of furniture with shining knobs, elegant cabinetry and mysterious dials that they had brought into their domiciles were ONLY on their own large, elegant, wooden piece of furniture with shining knobs, elegant cabinetry and mysterious dials that they had brought into their domiciles. and for this reason they said that the sounds were on 'the' radio: the particular one in their own home. do you see?

but, best beloved, this large, elegant, wooden piece of furniture with shining knobs, elegant cabinetry and mysterious dials that they had brought into their domiciles did not just entertain these people; it educated them so that years later when an even newer technol'gy called the tee vee came into their lives, they had gained infinite-resource-and-sagacity and understood that this new thing was indeed an interconnected rarified technol'gy. and they thought it small and self-centred to imagine that the wonderful pictures it showed them were unique to their personal tee vee set alone.

and this is why, you see, we say merely that things are on tee vee rather than on "the tee vee". and that is the end of that tale.

by the way, people do say "on radio" and "on the tv". here are the counts from the byu corpus of american english for "on tv/radio":

TV Radio the 1993 2717 the-less 12665 853

on 18-mar-08, at 8:04 pm, vincent torley wrote:

"If we do not agree to observe basic conventions relating to spelling and punctuation, our posts could easily degenerate to the kind of the mindless, unintelligible drivel that passes for English on some blogs - opinionated, over-emotive, rich in invective, uninformed and uninforming."

vincent seems to have been right: getting rid of majuscules, does lead to a complete degeneration into nonsense. how remarkable!

Peter Mark Roget & what he has wrought

The Times Online has a lovely biographical sketch of Roget, he of the thesaurus. There's currently something of a tug of war in our department about whether we should be recommending thesauri to students. Of course, there is nothing inherently wrong with them. From a practical viewpoint, however, problems do crop up.

These almost all stem from the fact that there are very few thesauri written with a language learner audience in mind. In fact, I have been able to identify only two: The Longman Language Activator & The American Heritage Thesaurus for Learners of English. The difference between these and your run-of-the-mill thesauri is that in a learner thesaurus, the words are explained and exemplified.

As the article points out, thesauri are really best used to jog loose an already known word that has become stuck somewhere in its journey from brain to hand. The typical pattern is to look up a common word (common words typically being easily brought to mind) to free a relatively rare one. For language learners, however, the lookup is most commonly from unknown (or poorly known) word to other unknown--and relatively rare--words. This is obviously not a particularly valuable process. A far better approach is to focus becoming familiar with more common words.

I'm not blaming Roget or the thesauri for this state of affairs. If students are going to use such books, it is up to teachers to help them see how to use them. Even with proper training, though, I'm not very confident that students will actually follow through. I'd prefer that they focus on using a dictionary well, ably, accurately, adeptly, adequately, attentively, capably, carefully, competently, correctly, effectively, efficiently, excellently, expertly, irreproachably, proficiently, properly, rightly, satisfactorily, skillfully, smoothly, soundly, splendidly, strongly, successfully, suitably, thoroughly, and with skill.

More muddled grammar

In the most recent issue of English Language and Linguistics, Rodney Huddleston reviews Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy's Cambridge grammar of English: A comprehensive guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Huddleston starts out with the positive:

It is certainly good to have a large number of examples from a spoken cor pus, and the Spoken Language set of chapters provide a useful account of features that are characteristic of speech rather than writing.

Having dealt with that, he moves on to considering the problems with the grammatical description and analysis, beginning thus:

"I have never seen a large-scale work on English grammar with anything remotely comparable to the amount of inconsistency and confusion to be found in the present work."

"Consider, as an initial example, the first two sentences of the section on tags (p. 547):

1. Tags are a type of clause without a lexical verb but which relate to the verb in the main clause of a sentence.
   Tags consist of auxiliary be, do, have, lexical verb be or a modal verb and a subject (most typically a pronoun).

The first sentence says a tag has no lexical verb while the second says that it may contain the lexical verb be; six of the ten illustrations contain this be and hence are counterexamples to the first statement in (1)."

Well, that's rather awkward, but I'm sure it's a one time... er...

"In the ‘Modality’ chapter they analyse the came of I’d rather she came on Tuesday than Monday as a ‘past subjunctive form’ (p. 669). This is of course traditional grammar’s analysis, but C&M must have forgotten that the accounts of verb inflection they present elsewhere differ radically from that of traditional grammar and in particular do not recognise a past subjunctive form (or ‘function’): the analysis is thus inconsistent with the rest of the book, where traditional past subjunctives, other than were (and modals), are treated as ordinary (indicative) past tense forms."

Yes, well,...

"C&M say repeatedly that modals don’t inflect for tense (e.g. pp. 303, 398, 405, 896, 928), but having said on p. 398 that might break has no tense they go on, on the very next page, to cite They may get here by six o’clock as an example containing a tensed verb phrase – and to say that ‘core’ modals do not occur in non-tensed verb phrases!"

OK, surely that's it all. No?

"C&M say on p. 502 that all elements in basic clauses which are not S, V, O, or C are A, but this is inconsistent with their recognition of other types of complement (in the broad sense) than O and C, namely prepositional complements and locative complements (e.g. pp. 497, 526). Both of these are involved in further inconsistencies. In examples like She gave it to me (p. 784) the PP to me is called a prepositional complement and in the ‘Verb complementation’ chapter such clauses are classified as ditransitive (with the PP now called ‘oblique complement’); in the glossary, however, a ditransitive verb is defined as one with two objects, indirect and direct."

So, how much of this is there?

Huddleston goes on for 18 pages and mentions that he's only discussing the major problems.

Wow, that's pretty embarrassing! But Huddleston is a theoretical linguist. It would be natural for a more practical-minded ESL-focussed book to take a different approach.

"I would emphasise, however, that the criticisms I have made here have not been made from a theoretically oriented position. This would not have been the place, for example, to argue for some of the more radical departures from traditional grammar that H&P adopt, and in fact some of the main criticisms I have made of C&M’s grammatical analysis concern issues where traditional grammar’s account is superior to theirs: modal auxiliaries as tensed verbs, dependent interrogatives, the part of speech classification of possessives like my, your, etc.... And of course the bulk of my criticisms have been concerned with the extraordinary amount of inconsistency in C&M’s account of the grammar, a failure to meet elementary standards that apply to any grammar,"

I see. So is there any redeeming quality? Say, a nice binding or a well-compiled index?

"One final complaint concerns the index, which is nothing short of a disaster."

Right.

Us teachers aren't pronouns

I have complained before about TESOL grammar guru Richard Firsten's grammatical misanalyses. Well, he's at it again.

Dear Richard,

I can't figure out whether I should say for we teachers or for us teachers. My inclination is that us is the correct form of that pronoun to use, but we doesn't sound bad to me. Can you please explain which is right and why?

Thanks in advance for your help.
Ackmal Yusof
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Dear Ackmal,

Your inclination is correct. After a preposition, we need to use the object form of a pronoun, so we need to say for us. The reason you might have been thrown is that this is being followed by an appositive, teachers, which refers to the pronoun. If that phrase is the subject of a sentence, you'll use we: We teachers need to express our concerns to the administrators. But your phrase is not the subject; rather, it's the object of the preposition, so for us teachers is the way to go.
...
I hope that clears this up, Ackmal.

My own sense of things, as well as the corpus searches that I've done seems to bear out Firsten's assertion that [preposition + us + (people)] is standard and [preposition + we + (people)] is not. And I further agree with him that it's a matter of case.

Where I disagree is with his analysis of we/us as a pronoun with an appositive. If that were the case, then you would expect to also find for them teachers and for him teacher. Clearly, these are not standard English. The first one is a dialectal variant (perhaps of those rather than of they suggests Geoff Pullum), and the second is simply ungrammatical.

Moreover, the appositive construction is implausible with any noun that I can think of. At least, you would need a determiner before the appositive noun (e.g., for the Packers, the underdogs). And then there's the issue of the comma.

Rather, I think we, us and you, apart from being pronouns, are also determinatives. In our example, determinative us is functioning, as determinatives typically do, as a determiner in a noun phrase. Under this analysis, the head of the noun phrase is teachers, where Firsten has us as the head.

Note that the other personal pronouns do not have equivalent determinatives, which is why you don't find for them teachers or for him teacher. It is, however, interesting to note that determinatives do not typically decline for case. You is the other one that might except that you does not have distinct forms for subject and object.

[See the follow up here]

Integrating relatives and agreement

I'm spending the weekend marking papers from my freshman writing class, and I came across the following sentence:

"Looking at other countries, such as Sweden that already has free post-secondary education for its students, it would be a good idea for Canada, as a nation, to do the same."

There are two ways to look at this problem, but either way, we need a comma after Sweden. Now, if we take the error to be one of number, all we need to do is to change the has to have to agree with countries and we're done. This is most likely what she meant. But there is another option: change the that to a which and suddenly has now agrees with Sweden.

The reason for this is that countries can be more clearly identified with more information whereas Sweden, being one of a kind, can't. Consequently, when we come to that, we automatically resolve it such that it applies to countries, as that is used only with integrated relative clauses. Which, on the other hand, works with supplementary relatives, making it entirely plausible that the information about free education pertains to Sweden making the relationship Sweden has rather than countries have.

Idiom Crisis Continues

The Onion reports on the ongoing US idiom shortage. Since the report came out, the US Secretary of State has reminded Canada of its obligations under NAFTA to share our natural idiom resources, but the Maritimes and the far north, who have traditionally been the largest suppliers of such locutions, have been reluctant to reduce stocks and are reportedly hoping for higher world commodity prices. "It's not just the English speaking countries," said Wally McGonigle, a spokesman for the guild of PEI idiom producers. "We've got English teachers all over the world banging down the door for this stuff. I'll be damned if we just open up our stocks and let a bunch of easterners get rich selling them to the States."

New 360-million words American corpus

Mark Davies and the folks at BYU have just released their long awaited BYU Corpus of American English (360+ million words, 1990-2007). This is the first large-scale balance corpus of American English that is freely available. It is similar in design to the British National Corpus but over three times bigger. There was a time when the American National Corpus was going to fill this role, but in the past 7 years, it has only managed to cobble together a meager 22 million words.

There are a number of changes I'd like made to the interface, such as adding the ability to search by word family, on top of the currently implemented lemma and word search, but overall, it's a lovely gift to the world. Thanks Mark!

Tendencies

From the BNC:

the ... tendency of 212
a ... tendency of 15
the ... tendency for 142
a ... tendency for 257

I can't say I see a difference in meaning, but "a tendency of" does sound odd. I wonder why.